Chapter 69

The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
--Pudd'nhead Wilsons's New Calendar.

There isn't a Parallel of Latitude but thinks it would have been the
Equator if it had had its rights.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

Next to Mr. Rhodes, to me the most interesting convulsion of nature in
South Africa was the diamond-crater. The Rand gold fields are a
stupendous marvel, and they make all other gold fields small, but I was
not a stranger to gold-mining; the veldt was a noble thing to see, but it
was only another and lovelier variety of our Great Plains; the natives
were very far from being uninteresting, but they were not new; and as for
the towns, I could find my way without a guide through the most of them
because I had learned the streets, under other names, in towns just like
them in other lands; but the diamond mine was a wholly fresh thing, a
splendid and absorbing novelty. Very few people in the world have seen
the diamond in its home. It has but three or four homes in the world,
whereas gold has a million. It is worth while to journey around the
globe to see anything which can truthfully be called a novelty, and the
diamond mine is the greatest and most select and restricted novelty which
the globe has in stock.

The Kimberley diamond deposits were discovered about 1869, I think. When
everything is taken into consideration, the wonder is that they were not
discovered five thousand years ago and made familiar to the African world
for the rest of time. For this reason the first diamonds were found on
the surface of the ground. They were smooth and limpid, and in the
sunlight they vomited fire. They were the very things which an African
savage of any era would value above every other thing in the world
excepting a glass bead. For two or three centuries we have been buying
his lands, his cattle, his neighbor, and any other thing he had for sale,
for glass beads and so it is strange that he was indifferent to the
diamonds--for he must have pickets them up many and many a time. It
would not occur to him to try to sell them to whites, of course, since
the whites already had plenty of glass beads, and more fashionably
shaped, too, than these; but one would think that the poorer sort of
black, who could not afford real glass, would have been humbly content to
decorate himself with the imitation, and that presently the white trader
would notice the things, and dimly suspect, and carry some of them home,
and find out what they were, and at once empty a multitude of
fortune-hunters into Africa. There are many strange things in human
history; one of the strangest is that the sparkling diamonds laid there
so long without exciting any one's interest.

The